Leading Tobacco Company: Increasing Retail Efficiency and Effectiveness with Accenture CAS

The solution has helped the company achieve its sales goals by increasing the number of daily sales calls to retailers at lower costs, resulting in improved sales and margins, and enhanced sales force performance.

Following an acquisition, the tobacco company wanted to improve the performance of its combined sales force. It had administration-heavy processes that reduced the time its sales representatives spent with retailers. Additionally, individual sales representatives had developed their own data-gathering and reporting techniques, making it difficult to track stock levels and identify the retailers qualified for incentives for maintaining stock levels at 100 percent.

The company chose the Accenture CAS software platform as it could provide the functionality needed to address the challenges and the scale to support future business objectives.

The Accenture CAS team helped the client with the implementation of an extensive program that included process redesign, software licensing, training and integration of the new sales force automation system with the existing technology.

Accenture worked closely with the client to redesign the processes for key precall and postcall activities, such as:

• Compiling historical data to prepare for sales calls with retailers

• Conducting sales calls by asking consistent questions and providing checklists for sales representatives to use

• Reporting sales calls

The new platform has helped the tobacco company achieve higher levels of efficiency in its internal processes. Implementation of Accenture CAS also improved productivity and operations in the following ways:

• Reduced the time taken for sales calls

• Automated the selection of driving routes for sales representatives

• Reduced programming and maintenance costs

• Reduced incidence of out-of-stocks